Hegarty Maths

Helping to improve your life chances

Hegarty Maths is a web-based package that has been developed to help improve your childs Mathematical skill set. GCSE Mathematics is a core subject that students must attain a Grade 4 as a minimum before they leave school. We recommend that students spend 2 hours on Hegarty Maths per week. However, to kick start the learning drive on W/C 01/10/2018 we would like students to spend 4 hours.

In 2011 we started making YouTube Maths videos to support our own classes with their maths homework and revision. We believe that, often, students just need to hear a maths concept one more time. In class students find it embarrassing to say they don't understand something and so having that explanation in a place they can view at home really helps. In a few years we made close to 1,000 videos covering Key Stage 3, GCSE and A-Level Maths. All this was done whilst full-time teachers and most videos were made in the very early hours of the morning or at weekends. We used the videos in many ways for our classes and these included homework, extra revision, and in a flipped learning model that produced our school's best A-Level and GCSE Maths results.

But then something amazing happened…

Since the videos were freely available on YouTube, students from all over the country and the world started using our videos in many ways. In particular, we found it was helping students who lacked confidence in maths or could not afford expensive private Maths tuition.

With the help of the most wonderful charity SHINE (Let Teachers SHINE), we won £15,000 of funding to make a website to host the videos and make more content to help as many students as we could. We made our old website called mathswebsite.com which hosts all our old videos (about 2,000) and it remains a place where students can learn and revise their maths for FREE. Our old site has been used in over 200 worldwide territories and had over 6 million views, with on average about 5,000 students using it everyday to support with their learning and all for FREE.

We knew we could do better…

We had a bigger dream to make an online platform that taught, assessed and tracked everything a child needs to learn in school maths from upper primary to IGCSE level. Our vision was to try and take as much of what makes a great classroom teacher and put it into an online format so this included: well-thought out maths explanations with carefully modelled examples, all learning built on pre-requisite knowledge, all videos followed by bespoke assessments perfectly matching the video and finally a simple and easy to use tracking system that allowed teachers to focus on pupils' mistakes whilst making the collection of tracking data easy. We built what we wished we always had as maths teachers. We believe that technology will not replace teachers, nor should it. However if we built a well-designed system, obsessively focused on the science of teaching and learning which allowed teachers to spend their valuable time on the things that matter, we could make a scaleable difference in maths education.